Method for finding text reading order in a document

ABSTRACT

A method for finding text reading order in a document such as a scanned newspaper or magazine includes the steps of pruning unnecessary text zones using semantic analysis ( 40 ), using text correlation measures to cluster zones ( 41 ), and then finding a reading order within each of the clusters ( 42 ).

The present invention relates to a method for finding text reading order in a document. The method finds particular although not exclusive application in the conversion of paper based documents into digital form, especially documents such as magazines or newspapers where the page layout may be relatively complex and where there may be more than one article on each page.

In large-volume document analysis and understanding systems, paper documents are scanned, processed, and archived. Many components are involved in such a system: page segmentation and region finding, text recognition, semantic analysis of the content, advertisement finding, article finding, identification of headers, footers, page numbers, captions, titles, authors, section, etc.

Within a single page, multiple text regions (zones or blocks) are identified in the document analysis process. A key challenge is to find out automatically how the text regions are related to one another and identifying the reading order. The reading order defines how a person would read those text blocks and is a key in the automated extraction of articles and related text from a page. Existing methods use layout and geometric information in addition to language rules to extract the reading order in a document. These methods do not work well on pages with large number of text zones, nor on pages having more than one article.

In a typical prior art system, paper documents are scanned and converted into raster electronic versions (i.e. digital high-resolution images). The raster document images are then converted into another electronic version that is meaningful to machines as it is to human beings. In such a process, a set of analysis and recognition processes must be performed.

The document analysis and recognition process include components for:

-   -   Image preprocessing—improving the raster image for acceptable         presentation quality.     -   Segmentation—analysis of the document to identify various zones         (regions or bounding boxes).     -   Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—recognition of text within         segmented zones.     -   Document structure analysis: table of content identification,         beginning and end of articles, reference detection, etc.     -   Semantic analysis: titles, authors, headers, footers, captions,         page numbers, footnotes, etc.     -   Advertisement detection.

According to the present invention a method for find text reading order in a document is characterised by those features set out in the characterising portion of the independent claim or independent claims.

The invention also extends to a computer program for carrying out the method for example as embodied in a series of electrical signals transmitted across a computer network. This includes, but is not restricted to, a computer program for carrying out the method of the present invention as downloaded from a server across a network such as the Internet. The invention further extends to computer readable media which carry such a computer program.

The invention may be carried into practice in a number of ways, and one specific embodiment will now be described, by way of example, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 illustrates a page of text, for example from a magazine or newspaper, with the text boxes marked;

FIG. 2 illustrates schematically the operation of an embodiment of the invention, for finding a reading order for the page of text shown in FIG. 1;

FIG. 3 shows the text boxes after pruning zones based on semantics;

FIG. 4 shows the correlation factors between the zones identified in FIG. 3.

FIG. 5 shows the zones after clustering; and

FIG. 6 illustrates the final output, showing the reading order within each of the identified clusters.

Turning first to FIG. 1, there is shown an exemplary page, for example from a newspaper or a magazine, which is to be processed according to the embodiment of the invention. The page includes a variety of different areas, including a picture 200, a page header 2, a title 1, and a variety of other areas which contain text 100. To simplify the diagram, most of the text within the text areas has been omitted.

The first stage in the procedure is to identify and label each of the areas which are found on the page. Included within this procedure are the steps of digitising the page as an image, carrying out preprocessing to improve image quality, identifying text and image areas and labelling them accordingly, and carrying our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on the text within each of the identified text zones. All of these steps may be carried out using procedures which are in themselves well known to a skilled person in the field. This stage is shown schematically by the box 39 in FIG. 2.

As illustrated by box 40 of FIG. 2, the next stage in the process is to prune the zones which have been identified as text zones using semantic analysis. During this part of the process, zones which have been identified as images, such as the zone 200 in FIG. 1, are ignored. Zone semantics for a magazine page might typically include specific rules for identifying all or some of the following zones: title, section, header, footer, date, footnote, page number, caption, body text, advertisement and so on. Rules to determine these specific zones may include, for example, position on page, size of zone, text size, physical relationship with other zones and semantic analysis of the actual text and/or punctuation. One specific implementation is described in the US application (Attorney Docket No. 200404720-1), filed Jul. 27, 2005 the contents of which are incorporated by reference.

Applying semantic analysis to the zones of FIG. 1 allows a number of the text zones to be pruned (in addition of course to the image zone 200). Specifically, zone 0 may be pruned as it represents a date, zone 1 is a header, zone 2 is a page or section header, zone 12 is a footer, and zones 13 and 14 are captions. As a result of pruning these zones, we arrive at the layout shown in FIG. 3. In this layout, all of the text zones are expected to be of interest, and to be included within the final reading order for the page.

Even with the reduced number of zones shown in FIG. 3, the task of determining a preferred reading order may be difficult or impossible to achieve using conventional methods. This may particularly be the case where there remain a large number of zones and/or where the page contains multiple articles each of which a human reader would recognise as being a single semantic entity.

Rather than attempting to process all of the identified zones at once, the present invention now proceeds to a clustering step, as indicated at box 41 of FIG. 2. The task here is to divide the zones up into clusters, with the zones within each cluster being semantically linked with one another. The aim is to ensure, so far as possible, that each cluster represents a single article on the page.

In order to generate clusters, we first analyse each zone using some appropriate semantic measure. We then cross correlate each zone against every other zone, to determine a zone correlation factor. Typically, the zone correlation factor will be a measure of the extent to which the text in one zone has similarities with the text in another zone.

The measures which are used for this process may be selected by the user according to the application in hand. The measures for an individual text block might include, for example, the number of characters, the number of strings, the number of spaces, the average word length, the presence or absence of particular words or classes of words, the type and density of punctuation and so on. Other measures of course may occur to the skilled man and may be used as appropriate. The individual measures for two separate zones will then be compared according to any convenient metric such as, for example, least squares, and the correlation factor between those zones determined.

In one particular embodiment, the similarity between a first zone and a second zone may be determined according to the text classification measures described by McCallum in “Bow: A toolkit for statistical language modelling, text retrieval, classification and clustering.” http://www.cs.cmu.edu/˜mccallum/bow, 1996.

The result of the correlation procedure will be a table, such as is illustrated in FIG. 4, which shows the extent of similarity between every zone within the set and every other zone. This table is then used to group the zones into one or more discrete clusters.

One convenient way of carrying out the clustering procedure is to define a minimum correlation threshold below which two zones are to be considered uncorrelated. In the present example, the cut-off has been taken at 0.04, and pairs of zones which have a correlation below that are ignored for this purpose and are not shown in FIG. 4. The cut-off value may be chosen by the user according to the application in hand. The remaining pairs are clustered using a simple zone-growing technique.

First, a single zone such as zone 22 is chosen to start a cluster. The cluster is then grown by adding to it all other zones, (zones 21 and 20 in this example) which have a correlation greater than the cut-off. The procedure is then repeated for the newly added zones. In this example, the addition of zone 21 automatically brings in zone 17 since 21 is correlated with 17 by a factor above the cut-off value. The addition of zone 17 then brings in zones 15 and 16, and so on. The procedure is repeated until no zone within the growing cluster is found to have a correlation greater than the cut-off value with any zone which is outside the cluster. In the present example, this generates a first cluster A, which includes zones 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 and 22.

Next, another unallocated zone is chosen (zone 11 in this example) to form the start of a second cluster. As will be seen from FIG. 4, only FIG. 6 has a sufficiently high correlation with zone 11 to be included in its cluster. Zone 6 does not itself have a correlation above the cut-off value with any zone other than 11. Hence, the second cluster, designated B, consists simply of zones 11 and 6.

Next, zone 7 is chosen as the start of a third cluster. Zone 7 is correlated with zone 9 which is itself correlated with zone 8. There are no other zones remaining. So the final cluster, designated C, consists of the zones 7, 8 and 9.

The final zone assignments are shown schematically in FIG. 5.

The final step in the procedure, as indicated by the box 42 in FIG. 2, is to determine the reading order within each of the resultant clusters. For this purpose, each cluster is assumed to be a single article which a human reader will read separately and independently of each other article. Accordingly, the reading order is considered entirely separately, cluster by cluster.

Within each cluster, traditional reading order recognition techniques may be used, for example those described by J Allen in “Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals”. Communications of the ACM, 36(11):832-843. 1983. The reading order may be determined using the techniques disclosed in the applicant's U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/964,094 (HP Ref. 200402381) filed on 13 Oct. 2004, Entitled, “System And Methods For Articles Extraction And Text Reading Order Identification”. Both of these documents are incorporated by reference.

Once the reading order has been determined, we have a final result as schematically shown in FIG. 6. In this example, we have found three separate articles, the first having a reading order which is indicated by the arrow 60, the second having a reading order indicated by the arrows 62, and the third having a reading order indicated by the arrows 64.

In the embodiment described, no directional order is imposed upon the three articles that have been located, it being assumed that a human reader will wish to read those separately and independently. Of course, should it be convenient in any particular application, further processing could if desired be used to link the articles in order, to indicate that a human reader may typically read according to the arrow 60 first, then the arrows 62, and finally the arrows 64. Such an ordering can be determined using conventional reading order techniques, for example by considering the placement on the page of the first block of text within each article.

The embodiment described above may be used in conjunction with any one or more of the optional refinement steps, described below. Those refinements aim to improve the clustering algorithms, and take place immediately after completion of the clustering algorithms described above.

In a first refinement, the zones that do not belong to any cluster are, in an additional step, assigned to one of the existing clusters based on layout proximity. This ensures that every zone is allocated to a cluster even if, during the initial clustering procedure, the particular zone has been ignored because its correlation with every single other zone is below the cut off value. Layout proximity may include measures such as distance from the nearest zone of an existing cluster, physical relation on the page to existing zones and/or clusters and so on.

In a second refinement, once clusters have been determined using the method described above, clusters having interleaving zones are then grouped together to form a new cluster. In this context, “interleaving zones” means zones which are interleaved in the layout flow of the page. The layout flow in the specific example described above proceeds down the first column, and then down the second column, and finally down the third column.

In the third refinement, a cluster may be split if a zone from another cluster interrupts the layout flow. To take an example: suppose we have a page with ten text zones, with the layout flow passing from 1 to 10 in that order. Suppose also that we have identified two separate clusters, namely (5 9 10) and (1 2 3 4 6 7 8). It will be evident that the first cluster interrupts the second at zone 5, so we split the second cluster at that point, thereby ending up with the three final clusters (5 9 10), (1 2 3 4), and (6 7 8).

It will be understood of course, that the method of the present invention will typically be embodied within a computer program consisting of executable instructions stored on computer readable media such as memory or other types of storage device. 

1. A method of finding text reading order in a document, the method comprising: (1). determining a plurality of text zones within the document; (2). for each zone, generating a semantic measure of the text within the zone; and (3). calculating a plurality of correlations between respective zone pairs; the method being characterised by: (4). clustering the zones into a plurality of clusters in dependence upon the said pairwise correlations; and (5). determining a separate reading order for the zones within each of the respective clusters.
 2. A method as claimed in claim 1 in which the semantic measure is multi-valued, and in which the correlation is determined in dependence upon the combined similarity of the respective values between a first zone of each pair and a second.
 3. A method as claimed in claim 1 in which the clusters are determined by the steps of: (a) selecting an initial zone as the start of a cluster; (b) adding to the cluster any zone which has a pairwise correlation of greater than a cut-off value with a zone already in the cluster; (c) repeating step (b) until no further zones are added to the cluster; and (d) repeating steps (a) to (c) until there are no more clusters to create.
 4. A method as claimed in claim 3 in which the cut-off value is user selectable.
 5. A method as claimed in claim 1 including, after step (4), assigning to an existing cluster any zone which has not already been assigned to a cluster by the said clustering.
 6. A method as claimed in 5 in which a non-clustered zone is assigned to an existing cluster based on layout proximity.
 7. A method as claimed in claim 1 including the step of determining whether any two clusters have interleaving zones, and if so merging the said two clusters.
 8. A method as claimed in claim 1 including the step of determining whether the zones of a given cluster, considered in order of layout flow, are interrupted by one or more zones of another cluster, and if so splitting the given cluster at the point of interruption.
 9. A method as claimed in claim 1 including, after step (2), excluding unwanted zones from consideration in dependence upon their respective semantic measures.
 10. A computer program comprising a series of computer-operable steps which, when run on a computer, execute a method as claimed in claim
 1. 11. A computer-readable medium carrying a computer program as claimed in claim
 10. 12. A sequence of electrical signals representative of a computer program as claimed in claim
 10. 